Secret Rotherham offers a unique insight into this bustling, modern
South Yorkshire town through a series of little-known and forgotten
stories, facts and anecdotes from its past. The town has an enviable
industrial history: Nelson's HMS Victory was armed with Walker cannons
made at Masbrough, the iron plates for Isambard Brunel's steamship the
Great Eastern were manufactured at Parkgate Iron & Steel Works, and the
firm of Guest & Chrimes invented the modern screw-down tap. Over the
centuries the Rotherham area has also had its fair share of famous
residents and visitors. It was the home of the Earl of Strafford, who
was beheaded in 1641; John Wesley, the 'Father of Methodism', was a
fairly frequent (if not always welcome) visitor to the area; Ebenezer
Elliott, the 'Corn Law Rhymer', was born and bought up in the town; and
the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams spent many a summer in one of the
outlying villages. In Secret Rotherham Melvyn Jones and Anthony
Dodsworth pull back the curtains of history to peer into the borough's
distant and not so distant past to reveal the forgotten, the strange and
the unlikely.